How to defend yourself against an ongoing negative SEO campaign?

Eneet Kaur, Senior Internet Marketing Expert

The entire SEO industry has matured over past years, as a result of which, every business wants to be online and that’s not it, with the business being online the vendor wants his business to be in the top segments searches of a Google page.

As a result, everyone today is optimizing their content for a search engine for their businesses. Cumulating the searches on top wasn’t very tough if we talk about some years ago, but today the increased traffic of devices and systems to each and everyone and every website owner want their site on top. Search Engine Optimization has brought many sites the much needed and deserved traffic, but every technology it has been misused too.

Yes, the unorthodox and unethical practices performed to keep the searches on top Google search.

It might get utterly ugly sometimes and no one can fully control such things. Of course, when there are good deeds, bad deeds come following. Targeting keywords on a top search using illegal unethical practices is the other name of the negative side of SEO campaigning.

Sometimes it gets even worse. When someone can’t get his or her target links on top, they prevent others too from coming on top with the legal, illegal and partially legal ways.

SEO is getting into an environment of such a huge competition that a large group of professionals has resorted to the use of certain unethical practices.

But somehow, if there is something wrong, there soon arises something good that can help prevent wrong to some extent.

So if there is something that is harming SEO harmony, there is something that can control and restrict the malpractices and revive the glory of Search Engine Optimization.

Some of the tools also known as “black hat tools” which are persistently being used in negative SEO marketing include SeNukexcr, Rankwyz, Xrumer etc. Some professionals overuse keywords, placing them website contents when they are not required or using them in the content where they make no sense, this practice is called ‘keyword farming’ and has brought traffic to websites that don’t offer good content and helped these not deserving to show among results and website rankings.

Now that we have discussed the tools used for the negative or unethical SEO campaign

Let’s talk about how can we defend ourselves against this negative SEO campaigning.

Reviewing links regularly, Checking backlinks for the possible presence of spikes over time, this should be a regular practice

Monitoring acquired backlinks and determines the quality of each

There are various backlinks monitors tools that can help determine the quality

Disavowing irrelevant and forced sites that have been attached to your links to minimize the damage

Deny scrapped content

Scrapped content refers to the practice of publishing someone else’s content and showing it off as his/her own. These scrapping targets the RSS feed on your page. Which further will steal the data from that feed and auto-publish it?

The other level of damage these scraps do is publishing the valid content into the spammy site and making it irrelevant, hence the page starts losing it audience thus reducing the organic traffic.

Security up gradation, this is the obvious and basic practice every online business vendor should do, upgrades should be on time and must be taken seriously.

Websites should be migrated from HTTP to https, which will further enhance the security in dealing with packets with no interference of any 3rd party person.

SSL certificates should be validated on time to ensure that the content on the website is safe and is operating on https regularly.

Not using the https protocols and valid ssl certificate will surely decrease the organic audience and people will choose other websites on which they can trust.

Checking regular security measures will grow the organic audience and will establish a trust between the audience and the vendor.

With this, we conclude that negative SEO campaigning is not good for business and website, and every user and professional should be aware and remain updated with latest measures to cope up with the negative sides of this otherwise wonderful marketing tool

Some another method that can be used to prevent negative SEO campaigning include

Google search console:

Google search console can be used to prevent negative SEO campaigning, Google search console can be used as a tracker which will inform you about your website’s health on ur mail on regular basis. Confirming that you always keep an eye on what’s going on your website and you don’t get any suspicious links that could disturb the organic audience

A-hrefs tool can also be used to prevent negative SEO campaignin

A-href’s tool is very helpful in finding the spammy backlinks that can damage the site,’s organic audience and could be embedded irrelevant links to your site.

Checking 404 crawl error page.

This is one of the most helpful ways to defend against negative SEO.

In your site’s analytics, you can open crawl page and check if there are any irregularities.

If there are irregularities like error 202 or error 404, there must be something spammy that is targeting your site and killing your organic audiences.

Regular check for irregularities can help prevent negative SEO attacks.

Google’s Algorithm update

You must have faith in Google’s algorithms. As Google it is trying very hard to keep the backlinks and spammer away.

Before it could be easier to spam a site or backlink the process, but after Google algorithm update, it’s, even more, harder to anyone to get spam on someone’s site with https working together help getting rid of spam links.